Trip Review: Backpacking in RMNP with others, Vol 1.

I wrote a trip review of backpacking in Rocky Mountain National Park last year. I wanted to write another review of a second backpacking trip that I recently went on. I took three friends of mine to RMNP for three overnight stays. We pulled the Glacier Gorge, Lake Verna, and Odessa Lake permits.

I flew into Denver Wednesday night. I've flown in before on the early morning flight and backpacked same-day before, and knew I wanted to avoid it if possible. Delayed flight didn't get me to the hotel until midnight, but I still got some good sleep before picking up two buddies at the airport the next morning around 7:45.

We made our way to the park, stopping by the wilderness office. The Rangers told us of a sketchy patch of snow above one of our campsites, but besides that said all sites were pretty good.

We hiked the long way up to the Glacier Gorge campsite, visiting Nymph, Dream, and Haiyaha Lakes

before setting up a mile past Mills Lake.


Our regret of the trip was not getting a photo of our campsite the first night. One of my buddies accidentally packed all his food for the entire trip (along with all his clothes) into his backpack. Needless to say, the food no longer fit in the bear crate. We roped together all the guy lines we had and were able to make a 12 foot long bear hang line. The backpack-top container holding all my buddy's freeze dried food for the week was sitting at barely 6 feet. While I found it was hilarious, mostly based on my having experience in RMNP with bears (knowing there are very very few of them), my friends were a touch nervous.

The next morning, I had an optimistic plan to hike to another spot before sunrise and catch the sunrise and have coffee at Timberline Falls at the base of Sky Pond. I did it last year and wanted to share the spot. We woke up at 5am. Two of my buddies decided to stay back because they got little to no sleep. Because the bear box was so full, it wouldn't open. We had to slam it down to try to open it. We finally got it to open, but didn't remember that we had put a pint of whiskey in the box. The plastic cap failed and the whole bear box and food inside were soaked in whiskey.

The large snowmelt made getting up to the top of Timberline Falls tough. It made getting down even harder. I slipped and fell about 10-15 feet down the face of the lower waterfall. I thought I was going to go much farther than I ended up sliding. I laugh about it now, but my buddy said I said "Oh shite!" and he turned and saw me sliding. I think it had a role in my actions later.


After our overly optimistic 8 mile morning hike, we returned to camp around 10am. We had been hiking for 5 hours. We got back out to the trailhead at noon and drove Old Fall River Road to the Alpine Visitor Center. There were whiteout conditions our entire drive up. I felt bad for the guys, they didn't get to see anything.


We drove to Grand Lake and had a large lunch at the BBQ place in town. We were all disinterested in hiking 8 miles out to Lake Verna to set up our campsite, especially since it was 2pm already and the forecast wasn't great. We sprung for a $650 airbnb 3 br/3 bath with 7 beds in it in Granby and spent the night laid up in luxury for the evening.

The next day we started with a hike on East Inlet trail to the meadows. It was a pleasant surprise how nice the short walk to the meadow was and how awesome the meadow looked that morning.

We stopped and grabbed lunch at Cy's Deli in Grand Lake as we made our way back into the park. We drove Trail Ridge Road back to Bear Lake road, making numerous stops along the way for panorama shots.


We hit the Bear Lake to Odessa Lake trail at around 5pm. Around 7 pm we get to the turn by Lake Helene. The valley that we step into might be my favorite scenery of RMNP I've ever seen.